2 Go-players density in european countries Simon Gemel Dear Go-friends: For those who are interested - I made a table of a so called Go-players-density of European countries. A kind of measurement of popularity of Go. E.g. it s quite clear, that there are more Go-players in Germany than in Luxemburg, because one country is much bigger than the other one. But if you take the population of all the countries and divide them by the number of Go-players, which are registrated from EGF by tournament-participation within the last 2 years, you get numbers with which you can compare countries easier. I already did this last year, so that there can be done some interesting comparison to this year. Greetings from Austria Dec 2003 Dec 2004 Country Population No of Go-density-factor** Rank No ofplayers* players* Go-densityfactor** Finland Luxemburg Slovenia Czechia Sweden Lithuania Netherlands Switzerland Germany Andorra Slovakia France Romania Poland Hungary Austria Belgium Croatia Norway Denmark U Kingdom Yugoslavia Rank Spain Iceland Ireland Italy Estonia ?? Ukraine Macedonia Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

4 Arctic Go Basti Weidemyr The game of Go has only recently conquered the Swedish part of Sapmi. This is the reason to why the region's strongest player has yet to receive a rank of 1 kyu. However, there are other strengths in the region. For instance, some of us are easily 1 dan at daydreaming. Go and daydreaming, two arts that befit a gentleman, can safely be expected to flourish in a part of the world where golf is confined to the snowless month of July. Blending these, you may arrive at the perfect concretization of creativity and perfectionism, or at an experience similar to the one that mr Donald Duck has to go through every Friday the 13th. I speak about the go tournament. In the following couple of pages, I will take you through my and my fellows' experience with arranging our first go tournament. It all started with a simple observation. Our nearest tournament was either Jusan Dan in Stockholm, or Siljan Go in Leksand, both 1000 km away. It was obvious that somebody ought to do something. The club had 15 members and I made the mistake of suggesting that we should hold an open tournament. Everyone agreed and most of us pledged to help with the organization. One member of the club, who disappeared two months before the tournament, suggested the name Arctic Go. A date in November was chosen, after carefully checking that it did not collide with other events, and invitations were sent out. Everyone expected me to provide leadership and take initiatives, maybe because I dared to suggest a tournament. I tried to squeeze back by suggesting that we formed a committee with a chairman and a secretary but, as expected, nobody accepted a position on it. So unfortunately, I had to accept total responsibility. I would have been better off without a tournament at all. It was a blunder, like becoming engaged with two ladies at the same time or playing the first move of a gote sequence when you could have captured a big dragon from your opponent. However, bitterness earns you no friends so I shouldered my burden and went to work. The two most important issues were deemed to be getting a rental agreement and an agreement for borrowing game clocks from the chess club. I contacted a guy from the chess club and he replied "Nemasproblemas". I thought I knew the meaning of that word but I am no longer sure. Turning to the hosting, we had four requirements for the facility: participants must be able to sleep there; there must be toilets; there must be an Internet connection (with an IP-number, not DHCP) and it has to be big enough for 15 tables. We found one contender. It won. With one and a half month left, the author went to see the headmaster for Midskogsskolan. The headmaster could not recall where he had put his template for the rental agreement so he asked me to come back one week later. Next time, he explained that he would never find the template, so he needed some time to make a new one. "Can you call next week?" With less than month left, I called and got this response. "That is not the most important thing I am doing right now." We met again after one week. This time, we brought one prewritten agreement each. Proposition 1 When working with people who are employed by the government, be sure to allocate at least three times more time to the task, than should be required. The agreement stressed particularly one clause, which is not even needed in Europe - that of principal responsibility. It means that if someone destroys something, unless it can be established who did it, you will have to pay the damage. In my case, since I have no money, it would probably mean to give up my engineering studies. With more than twenty participants, my future looked bleak indeed Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

5 - 5 - Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

6 Proposition 2 Do not tell mom. I opened an ICQ-conversation with the guy from the chess club again two weeks before the tournament. Doubts were growing in my mind (and that is a place where they will never run out of nutrition), so I asked him to explain the meaning of "nemasproblemas". He said, "if I am responsible and no one is going to use them, there should be no trouble". He was not responsible. Our go club consists mostly of people who work with computers at least five hours per day. Some are teh 1337, some are hackers, some are geeks and some are nerds. With this magnificent flora of occupations and backgrounds, one month before the tournament when we had scheduled to run a broadcasting test, I was eager to explore what our team had come up with in terms of web-tv, advertisement creatives and information management systems to cover the tournament. Not even an intro, it turned out. I did my best to stress how important preparations were. We decided that the test should be carried out on Sunday one week before the tournament. We also agreed on exactly what should be done before that. It was a project with very much down-scaled ambitions but still, the first radio broadcast by Reginald Fessenden was not remembered for its good quality or cool intro. It was historic, and so would the 1st Arctic Go have been. Luleå is a cold place. During the winter, the temperature usually ranges between 5 degrees and -30. You would not want to spend a second beyond what is necessary outdoors. As I suffer from the sick building syndrome, which gets more serious when I am freezing, for me, it is even more important to stay indoors and eat and sleep regularly. Attending every club meeting was a heavy burden which added to the weight of going around to various places in Luleå in order to get things done. If I had been well, things would have been easier. Doubting that we would manage to broadcast anything at all, I decided to cancel our attempts to sign up a sponsor. Proposition 3 Be well. It was two weeks before the tournament and we were blessed with four problems. We had no demo-board for the seminar, no car driver (or car), no printer and no percolator. We did not even have one single member of the club who knew how to make coffee. Even if most gentlemen and intellectuals prefer Jolt cola, there is still a small but vocal fragment left who demands coffee, so it was apparently a serious matter and we failed completely. The most senior member of the club was a great help to me during this period. His experience was valuable and it was his idea to ask the porters of the school for a whiteboard. He had a printer too. However since he was moving at the time, it was hard to find. It emerged that another one of our members had a working printer at home and he promised to bring it. I told him to test it carefully but he said there was no need for testing because he knew it was working. With one week left it was time to test our broadcasting organization. We would also try out the computer program which would be used for the pairings, MacMahon. I instructed the guy who would run the program, to read about how it works and to simulate a tournament at home, in order to see to it that there would arise no problems. He did. However, it was just a small one and a small tournament is not quite the same as a big one. On Sunday noon, most of the club had gathered around a table in the B-house, at the university, where we usually play on Sundays. The guy who would bring the camera, however, did not show up and he could not be reached by phone. Another club member went home to fetch his camera. Once he returned, we found out that it could not work with any of our laptops. With just an hour left, we run a nigiri-tournament with six participants. Not enough to test MacMahon but better than nothing. Proposition 4 Take the most overzealous member of the club and tell him (for it is a him) to spend night and day, for at least a year, on learning the MacMahon program. It turned out that the guy who could not be reached had overslept himself. The days immediately before the first Arctic were spent on fetching the game timers and purchasing food. 120 cans of lemonade/cola, 100 kroner worth of fruit, and chocolate, cookies and more were stockpiled. In Skåne (Scania), where I come from, we have a saying that the key to a successful event is good food, lots of food and food in its right time. We made this a priority. It turned Friday afternoon and it was time to lay out the 100m ethernet cable that would connect us to the Internet. Without boring you with the details it suffice to say that the guy with the laptop had forgotten to bring his computer, so we could not Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

7 check that the connection actually worked. Also we had been told to connect the cable to port 10. Now, there were two routers, each with a port 10, so we had an approximate 40 percent chance. The connection was provided by the IT-office of the municipal government and of course, they left their office while we scrambled a laptop. The connection did not work. See proposition 1 again. At around 23:30, our driver arrived from Piteå. We went to my apartment immediately and fetched the food, lemonade and game timers. In the haste, I forgot two packs of cookies in the refrigerator. As I could not sleep during the night, I decided to go home and fetch them. I had been given a security card by the porters. As expected, it did not work when it should. So I found myself outside in the -17 degrees C at half past five in the morning. I tried to call the guy with the printer but he did not wake up. After calling a heap of numbers finally I received help. On Saturday morning, after a tai-qi show and a chaotic registration, when the pairings were being made, the person who was appointed to learn the MacMahon program asked me how we should configure the initial MacMahon scores. I suggested two stones per MacMahon score and he asked "How do I do that?" After some trial and error, we found a set up that seemed to work. It had just three MacMahon levels, and 9 kyus were paired with 1 dans, but it did produce a pairing. We were 30 minutes late and with a slightly desperate tone I hissed "Print this!". "Yes, we need to install the printer first, though", came the reply. "What? Is it not installed?!" "It will be a quick procedure." After maybe ten minutes I began to ask questions. I turned to the guy who brought the printer. "Did I not tell you to test it?" "But it works", he replied. "I see no paper coming out of it." "That is correct, however, it is because the drivers do not work with the laptop, so I can promise that the printer works." "Turn the computer around and let people read from the screen!" "Wait we can try to.." Proposition 5 Make it clear to all of the organizers that the day before the tournament is for preparations and technical issues - - not for playing go. Make it clear, also, that the rounds are for playing go -- not for dealing with technical issues. "Ahem, we do not have round two. Somebody forgot to push the record button." It is a little bit hard to actually blame someone for neglecting their appointments when you suspect that it is intentional. Next, someone found out that we had no more than 4GB left on the hard disk. One of us went home and fetched an ethernet cable so that we could transfer files between our laptops. I missed most of the seminar because I went to bed, but the TV-group explained that the sound recording did not work so the only sound we had was that from the microphone which was built into the camera. Michael Yao, 5d, was not impressed by the sound quality. "Ahem, after we copied round 1 and 3, it seems they were never removed from the hard disk, so we have just the first hour of round 4." The Sunday turned out to be mostly problem-free -- no terror attacks or natural disasters, not even an earth quake. The clean-up afterwards, went smoothly too. The seminar, however, caused lots of trouble. It had to be copied in pieces because the hard disk was broken in the middle of it. We spent days on trying to copy it before we succeeded. Proposition 6 Use a back-up if possible. Despite the lack of planning and preparation in the areas of web-tv coverage, it would be unreasonable to describe the 1st Arctic Go as a failure. Our primary objectives were to introduce tournament go to a part of the world where it has never been played before, and to create an environment in which players from Northern Finland and Northern Sweden can meet, make friends and get to know each other. This happened. Broadcasting a tournament like Arctic Go on the Internet is not too hard. All you need is some equipment, some experience with computers and a couple of days of preparations. Our attempt was thwarted by a lack of engagement on the part of the computer savvy among us. Some club members did not want to take any initiatives because they presumed that there were others in the club that would do it better. Some of these "others" may have reasoned that "it would be cool if we managed to get a broadcast out but nobody would have watched it anyway and I am not going to waste my day on actually making it work". This stood in stark contrast to the efforts made by most of us, who helped organize the event. Many of our club members are very young and may Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

8 have been inexperienced. In retrospect, however, our club was probably too small to handle the broadcasting part. For there are different kinds of go players. Some are serious about go. Some are serious in general. And some are just not serious at all. We need all these people. Together we make up the European go community and it needs to grow. Being a part of this community should not in itself imply a commitment. However, the most valuable members of the go community are those who are willing to commit themselves to bringing life to the sport by arranging tournaments and spending time on the administration of their clubs. Thank you very much, all who helped with the organization of the 1st Arctic Go and all who have helped with the organization of go tournaments this year. May your groups never run out of liberties. At a bus stop outside a shopping mall, I met one of our newest club members, who disappeared a month before the 1st Arctic Go. His eyes were wide open as if he was high with ecstasy. "I am sorry that I could not come to Arctic Go. I have had better things to do.", he said as he went aboard the bus. You have to forgive him his blasphemous remarks. New to the game as he is, he has not yet grasped the full width and depth of the benefit that this art is blessing its practitioners with. Presumably, he had spent this time with his girlfriend. One must ask, however, why he did not bring her to the tournament? If she is a prudent young woman with a mind for beauty and arts, surely, she will appreciate it even more than you and I. If you have not yet made up your mind, remember, it is better not to marry at all than to marry in gote. Go in Finland Matti Siivola Autumn 2004 About a dozen events are listed in the Finnish go Calendar since the last Nordisk GoBlad. The Finnish championship was won for the fourth year in a row by Vesa Laatikainen, 5 dan. Second was Matti Siivola, 5 dan. For the first time in twelve years a new player entered the top three. He was Kare Jantunen 3 dan. Oulu hosted several tournaments, first the Minds Sports Festival and then Oulu championship including two qualification tournaments. Antti Törmänen dominated the tournaments. No one from Finland went to Tasllinn tournament as we heard about it only afterwards. The major international tournament in Finland was Toyota IGS-Pandanet Europan Go Tour at Tampere. There were 62 players including 6 dans from Hungary and Russia. There were also foreign players from Estonia and Germany. Unfortunately all the preregistered swedes cancelled their trip. The tournament was won by Diana Köszegi and the 9 by 9 free paired side tournament by Antti Törmänen. Nine Finns went to London Open Go Congress. Their tournament was successful as they scored 48 wins out of 72 games and earned three dan level promotions. Teemu Rovio and Suvi Leppänen won the Pair Go tournament Nordisk GoBlad 1 / 2005

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